"PaaS gave us the flexibility to be very nimble as a team, to prototype quickly - and to throw stuff away if it didn't work," said Mario Cruz, CTO of Choose Digital in Miami that offers a digital marketplace platform, according to TechTarget. "It's like having a whole infrastructure team in-house, without actually having an infrastructure team."

At the same time, the introduction of a cloud infrastructure or PaaS environment can be a burden for organizations, largely because traditional, monolithic applications will have trouble operating in the cloud, if they function at all, TechTarget noted. For this reason, many technology experts believe PaaS should be mainly used for developing solutions, not necessarily to manage legacy tools.

IaaS providers often recognize the growing demand for PaaS technologies, which is encouraging service providers to offer additional tools within their IaaS offerings.

"PaaS is too big of a step change for people to make incrementally. People still care about machine instances," cloud expert Pat O'Day said, according to TechTarget. "We see demand for a sort of 'IaaS plus.'"

In other words, organizations today want their IaaS offerings to come with other services like identity management, content networking and object storage.

A separate report by Synergy Research Group highlighted the growing demand for PaaS and IaaS, noting that the market for these technologies generated more than $2 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2013, up 56 percent from the same time in 2012. As businesses continue to look for innovative opportunities to improve operations and reduce costs in today's highly competitive corporate environment, decision-makers will pursue cloud technologies with more enthusiasm than ever before.

By planning ahead and successfully navigating the constantly evolving cloud landscape, executives within organizations of all sizes can be sure they provide employees with the tools they need to optimize performance and gain an advantage over rival firms.